Earlier this week I was tagged by Kay from Cheery Little Thing to join in with the Creativity Blog Hop. Thanks for the tag, Kay and thanks for the nice things you said about my blog and my photos!
The rules of the blog hop are to answer the three set questions and then nominate two other people to take part. So without further ado, here are the questions and my answers:
#1 What have been the doings/makings/scribblings at your desk over the past week or so?
Ooh, right. Now then. I’ve been working on a story idea with my friend John who I’ve known for about ten years now (crikey, time flies) and was introduced to as part of a writer’s group.
We used to meet up for a chat and to exchange story snippets (and eat chips, if I recall correctly). I ended up getting a job at the same place as John, the writing continued but he was always more prolific than me, but not as prolific as Dave, the guy who introduced us. Dave would regularly churn out tens/hundreds of thousands of words whilst I would manage a bit, usually starring Monty (some of which has featured on this very blog and which was mainly written to amuse myself.
Recently John suggested a collaboration – he’s come up with a start of story snippet and we’re working on that together. Though mainly bouncing ideas around at the moment, but it’s definitely got some potential.
Also, a few years back I found myself in the middle of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) where I managed to churn out 50,000 words of sci-fi shenanigans. It was fun to write and has the germ of a plot in it, but I could never work out quite what was wrong with it. Various people turned up and did various things to various other people. They went from point A to point B whilst others went from point C to point D, when really the people at D needed to be at A in order to to get to C before they got to B. It was all very confusing so I put it to one side to pick up another day.
Then I saw a post about how J.K. Rowling plotted Harry Potter with a hand-drawn spreadsheet and was struck that this was the answer – take the plot threads as I have them and put them into a spreadsheet – this will let me see who’s doing what, where and when. And, more crucially, will let me work out how the various threads all tie together.
So I’ve been looking at that too. Fun!
#2 Where are you currently finding your inspiration?
See, I should really read the questions first, eh? See above for the writing stuff.
Regular readers will know that I’m a keen photographer. I’ve posted up some photos on here and I’ve got a ton over on Flickr. Inspiration for photos can come from anywhere, but I really like exploring and finding the little bits of everyday life which often get missed. I’ve spent years exploring Leeds and taking photos. I also like sunsets a a lot.
Inspiration for blog posts comes from anywhere – you may have noticed (or you will if you stick around) that this blog doesn’t really have a focus, it’s more of a random collection of stuff I’ve found interesting. It varies wildly from musings about maps to a recent A-Z of movies. Seriously, anything could take my fancy at a moment’s notice – some days I’ve blogged three or four times, other times it’s weeks between posts. Hopefully you’ll find something entertaining in here.
#3 How important is being creative to you & how do you blend this with your work/life/family balance?
Ah, now there’s the tricky bit. What with family life (two kids, two guinea pigs and a hamster) and other stuff, we’re usually busy off doing something or going somewhere to visit someone, and by the time the kids are in bed and it’s time to settle down, it’s late and often hard to motivate myself to do anything other than sit in front of twitter or surf the internet rather than do creative things. But then again, Liz has some excellent thoughts on making time for creativity, so I shall be trying to follow her good example…
Now that tagging – I’d like to tag my good friends (and super-creative people) Lucie from Love, Lucie and Mike from Backwards Lion, both of whom are creative in very different ways!
espresso coco 
I think you’d really like a day offline a week, give it a try! Although I do rather love the idea of a plot building spreadsheet, so do that too… 🙂 I have to say, I’d love to write a novel but I’m really not sure that there’s one in me. God knows what I’d even write about. They say you should write what you know? But I write that all on my blog anyway, so maybe that’s my limit. I’d love to see your novel one of these days though…